M A I N   N E W S

No blank cheque for NC: Cong
2014 poll tie-up: Party wants to keep options open
Arun Joshi/TNS

Jammu, December 10
Most Congress leaders in Jammu and Kashmir have said no to a pre-poll alliance with its current ally, the National Conference. It wants to keep its options open for the next Assembly polls due in 2014.

Pradesh Congress Committee chief Saifuddin Soz declared that the “matter would be decided by the party high command,” but at the same time, he, and his loyalists have conveyed to the top leadership that the “pre-poll alliance would be suicidal” and summon the dark days of post 1987 elections, that heralded the arrival of militancy in Kashmir. “It would be far worse if we took this suicidal path once again,” observed a senior Congress minister.

He has already calculated, like many of his party leaders in the state, that the Congress alone can win at least 35 seats on its own. His calculations rest, the way Union Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad had done in 2008 elections that there would be division of votes between the National Conference, the PDP, the Peoples’ Conference in the Valley and net gainer would be the Congress.

“The success in the Legislative Council polls was an exception,” the minister said. It is altogether a different matter to get the alliance working for 33,000 village heads, and to get more than 59 lakh voters repeating the same thing in the Assembly elections.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah had floated the idea of “grand alliance” with the Congress ahead of the Assembly poll in 2014 while campaigning for the LC elections, but his uncle and additional general secretary of NC, Sheikh Mustafa Kamal said this could be “Omar’s personal view”.

“The party has taken no such decision,” Mustafa Kamal had said. As of now, the Congress has its own limitations. It would have to depend on the directions of the party high command while hoping that Rahul Gandhi- Omar Abdullah friendship did not come in their way the two parties fighting Assembly polls on their own, rather in alliance with each other.

But there can be a last-minute change in the situation, depending on what Congress president Sonia Gandhi and AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi would decide, sources in the Congress and the National Conference told The Tribune.

Correct as it is that there were no walkouts from the Cabinet meetings during the NC-Congress rule in the state for the past four years, but there was a fierce war of words between the two allies on the removal of Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), that grants immunity to the security forces in the acts of omission and commission; extension of the 73rd Amendment to the Constitution of India and rotational Chief Minister - to name a few.